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I've been blogging for over 10 years now primarily for friends and family interested in following how we deal with the Florida hurricanes and tropical storms starting in 2004: Hurricanes Happen.

I retired after a 28-year career with Cox Enterprises and it's radio and Valpak divisions, I eventually will be blogging about either what I know professionally, retired life, and/or other diverse thoughts.

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Saturday, August 18, 2012

Back in April at FranCamp 2012, I spent a fair amount of time beginning the conversation of the advantage Big Brands have over Small Brands on Facebook.

Over the summer, I took some time to do a down and dirty analysis of Franchised Brands' relative rank in Facebook "Likes" compared to their overall size, based on world-wide sales. I'm not a researcher so this nothing scientific and you could have done it if you wanted to invest the time.

So since I did invest the time, here are the results of simply looking at the top 100 Franchised Brands from the 2011 Franchise Times report and looking at the number of "likes" they have on Facebook.

Some quick observations that may not be very surprising:

Of the Franchise Times Top 100 Franchised Brands, 47 are Food concepts and they completely dominate the top "Liked" Franchised Brands.

43 of the Top 50 "liked" Franchised Brands on Facebook are all Food.

The Top "Liked" Non-Food brand is GNC with nearly 600,000 likes

The ONLY other Non-Food brands in the Top 50 "Likes" are Ace Hardware, am/pm, Snap On Tools, Curves and UPS Stores

Now here's where it got interesting for me. What's the delta between the brand's rank in the Top 100 (again, based on system-wide world-wide sales) vs. their rank in Facebook "Likes"?

Note: I did not include the Lodging and Real Estate Brands in this analysis because, quite frankly, they're a mess. Most of them have so many different local properties and franchisees with pages that I couldn't come to a simple conclusion on their aggregated "likes" without a ton more time invested (wasted).

It's interesting to see the biggest deltas between the Sales rank and the Facebook rank. These brands are the top ten overachievers:

Krispy Kreme

Jimmy Johns

Five Guys

Hooters

Bojangles

Buffalo Wild Wings

Zaxby's

Long John Silvers

Baskin Robbins

Steak N Shake

Those restaurant brands that have opportunity to grow their "likes" based on their sales rank include:

KFC

Wendy's

Burger King

Tim Horton's

Since I started this blog post back in May and finished it in early August, I have another cut of the data that shows the growth of "Likes" for the top brands. Generally, the growth per brand was between 5-8%. Not bad for essentially 90 days.

All in all, this was an interesting project. The leader of "Liked" Franchise Brands continues to be McDonald's with over 21 million "likes" followed by Subway with 15.6 million, Taco Bell (nearly 9 million), Buffalo Wild Wings (8.2 million) and Pizza Hut (8.1 million).